| 1914 or 1938?
By Antonio C. Abaya Written Aug. 23, 2006 For the Standard Today August 24 issue A leading American columnist � I cannot recall his name, and I seem to have deleted his column from my computer � wrote last week that the hostilities between Israel and the Hezbollah from July 12 to August 14 reminded him of �The Guns of August�, the famous book by Barbara Tuchman that chronicled the step-by-step descent of Europe into The Great War, which ultimately became known as World War I. The first shot in June 1914 was fired, in Sarajevo , by a Bosnian Serb nationalist student killing the visiting Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who was not even a head-of-state but was only the heir to the imperial throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The parallelism is that the immediate adversaries were not isolated protagonists but were backed by more powerful allies: Serbia by the great Slavic power Russia , Austria-Hungary by an expansionist Germany . As one side flexed its military muscles, the other side replied in kind, in a macabre dance of death that drew in more and more protagonists. France, Italy , Great Britain and (much later), the United States to the side of Russia and Serbia . Turkey and the vast multinational Ottoman Empire to the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary .. In the present conflict, the Hezbollah is supported and armed by Syria and Iran , Israel by the United States and Great Britain . Will these powers be sucked into a wider war? Another American columnist, with a more hawkish bent, likened the present stand-off in the Middle East to Europe in 1938, when British hesitation to confront Hitler militarily allowed the Nazi dictator to walk into one country after another, confident that no one would stand in his way. Presumably, this columnist wants to expand the Middle East war into Iran , According to the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersch � who became famous for exposing the massacre of almost 500 unarmed women,, children and old men in the Vietnamese village of My Lai by a platoon of American soldiers in the 1960s � the US government was closely involved in the planning of Israel�s military operations against the Hezbollah long before the July 12 kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by the Hezbollah, which, the Israelis claim, called for a response from them.. This kidnapping was merely a pretext used by Israel and the Americans to justify the subsequent Israeli bombing of Lebanon which killed more than a thousand Lebanese civilians and destroyed much of the infrastructure of that country. (Similarly, the March 2003 invasion of Iraq is known to have been planned by a group of neo-con intellectuals led by Paul Wolfowitz as early as 1997, long before 9/11, which was merely used to justify it.) According to Hersch, in the Aug. 21 issue of The New Yorker, the Israelis had planned the bombing campaign � and shared those plans with the Americans - long before the kidnapping took place. The kidnapping was just the provocation that the Israelis wanted and waited for to unleash their bombing campaign. Several Israeli officers, wrote Hersch, actually visited Washington long before the kidnapping, �to get a green light� from the Americans, and �to find out how much the US would bear.� �The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits,� Hersch quoted an unnamed Pentagon consultant. �Why oppose it? We�ll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran .� This seems to have been the game plan. If the neo-cons in the Bush administration, led by Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were to use the military option against Iran , the Hezbollah must first be neutralized so that they cannot retaliate against Israel by lobbing Iranian-supplied missiles into Tel Aviv. (Hersch, being Jewish, cannot be accused of being an anti-Semite, a charge usually leveled against those who criticize Israel. For the politically correct, criticizing Israel is on the same moral plane as sodomy, incest and bludgeoning a puppy to death.) About four months ago, Hersch wrote another article in The New Yorker alleging that American special forces were being infiltrated into Iran from Pakistan , with the specific mission of marking out the GSP coordinates of potential Iranian targets for American bombing. See my article After Iraq, Iran, April 16, 2006 . The timing of the Israelis� disproportionate response to the Hezbollah provocation is very significant. Iran has been given up to the end of August to comply with the United Nations Security Council�s demand that it abandon its program of uranium enrichment, which is a major step towards the production of nuclear weapons. So if Iran were to reject the UN-SC demands next week, as it is expected to, the US would most likely rattle its sabers and make threatening noises about keeping the military option open, especially after the Hezbollah�s missiles and rockets have, hopefully, been effectively silenced by Israeli bombing. Unfortunately for Israel and its American backers, the Hezbollah turned out to be a tougher adversary than anticipated. The Israeli bombing campaign, which was supposed to be a dry run for and prelude to an attack on Iran , failed to crush the Hezbollah. On the last day of hostilities, before the ceasefire took effect, the Hezbollah fired more than 250 Katyushas into Israel , the biggest single-day rocket barrage in the 33-day war. The most important military lesson learned by the Israelis (and the Americans) from this war is a lesson evident in many previous wars, that bombing alone cannot defeat a well-entrenched, well-armed and well-motivated enemy. To root them out of their bunkers and tunnels, you have to go in with infantry and engage them in close-quarter combat. But be prepared for casualties. During this 33-day war, Israel lost 121 soldiers in combat, a high casualty figure for such a small country. Adjusting for population differences, this would be like the US losing 5,400 servicemen killed in action in 33 days. The US did not suffer this many dead even during the fierce 30-day Tet Offensive of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army in 1968. The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 killed �only� 2,300 Americans. On D-Day, June 6, 1944 , the US lost some 2,500 dead on the beaches of Normandy . I doubt if the Americans suffered another 2,900 dead in the next 32 days as they pushed deeper into Occupied France. So, as far as I can tell, except perhaps during their Civil War in 1861-1865, the Americans have never suffered, pro rata, the military casualties that Israel suffered in its 33-day war with the Hezbollah in 2006.. According to news reports, something like three quarters of Israel �s casualties were inflicted by the Hezbollah�s anti-tank missiles, some of which were Russian-made, others German-French-made. Hezbollah also had TOW or wire-guided missiles that can be guided, like in a video arcade, to the target�s most vulnerable parts � such as a tank�s engine compartment - with almost unerring accuracy.. The Israelis lost at least 27 of their highly vaunted Merkava (Hebrew for Chariot) tanks, with their distinctive Israeli-designed and Israeli-built pronouncedly sloping gun turrets. (The chasses are British-made.) Another discouraging lesson for the Americans. If they were foolish enough to attack and invade Iran , their Abrams main battle tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles would become armored coffins for thousands of their troops. American public opinion will not support this level of casualties. A public opinion poll released by CNN on Aug. 23, showed that only 35% of Americans were in favor of continuing the war in Iraq , and a whopping 61% were against. No matter how much President Bush drones on, with his famously limited vocabulary, about �defending freedom,� more and more Americans are rightly fed up with his war in Iraq , and they are unlikely to support another, even bigger, war in Iran . According to the Aug. 20 issue of The Washington Post, a television debate was actually aired on NBC recently on the subject � emblazoned at the bottom of the TV screen � IS BUSH AN IDIOT?, emceed by Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman Unless his troops kill or capture Osama bin Laden in the next two months, Bush�s Republican Party faces a major defeat in the mid-term elections this November. Bush�s remaining major mass support base is the Christian fundamentalists of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Christian fundamentalists support a hard line position in the Middle East because they believe that the state of Israel was ordained by God. They also believe that the biblically prophesied Armageddon, the Final Battle between Good and Evil, has actually begun or will soon begin, during which most of the population of Israel, from the Sea of Galilee to the Red Sea port of Eilat, will be wiped out, except for 144,000 Jews who will convert to Christianity. This will be the signal for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. (See my article Understanding Bush, Oct. 15, 2003 .) To go back to the question in the title of this article, is the world facing a 1914 or a 1938? If the innate good sense of the American people prevails, neither scenario would unfold. But if the neo-cons and the Christian fundamentalist weirdoes continue to win out in Washington , as they have so far, then it would be futile to even run for your life because, as the Tom Lehrer song goes, �We will fry all together when we fry.� ***** Reactions to [email protected]. Other articles since 2001 in www.tapatt.org. OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO |
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| ON THE OTHER HAND |
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Reactions to �1914 or 1938?� Dear Mr. Abaya, Your article encapsulated the misgivings many people feel about the American role in Iraq and the Middle East in general. You have spelled out very clearly how the Bush White House is sinking into a quagmire by making one miscalculation after another. Peter Baker of the Washington Post thinks that, despite the outward bravado, the Bush White House is going into a pessimistic funk on their Iraq policy. Says Baker: �Of all the words that President Bush used at his news conference this week to defend his policies in Iraq, the one that did not pass his lips was "progress." For three years, the president tried to reassure Americans that more progress was being made in Iraq than they realized. But with Iraq either in civil war or on the brink of it, Bush dropped the unseen-progress argument in favor of the contention that things could be even worse. The shifting rhetoric reflected a broader pessimism that has reached into even some of the most optimistic corners of the administration -- a sense that the Iraq venture has taken a dark turn and will not be resolved anytime soon. Bush advisers once believed that if they met certain benchmarks, such as building a constitutional democracy and training a new Iraqi army, the war would be won. Now they believe they have more or less met those goals, yet the war rages on. Bush acknowledged this week that he has been discouraged as well. "Frustrated?" he asked. "Sometimes I'm frustrated. Rarely surprised. Sometimes I'm happy. This is -- but war is not a time of joy. These aren't joyous times. These are challenging times and they're difficult times and they're straining the psyche of our country." Even the death of al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq proved not to be the turning point that was expected and other developments have been relentlessly dispiriting, with fewer signs of hope. Bush has been ruminating on the different nature of Iraq and the battle with Islamic radicals and how hard it is to define victory. "Veterans of World War II and Korea will tell you we were able to measure progress based upon miles gained or based upon tanks destroyed, or however people measured war in those days," he said in a speech last week."This is different . . . and it's hard on the American people and I understand that." (Duh . . . wasn�t the Vietnam war different too? But then, what would Dubya know when he was too busy boozing and partying away as a �National Guardsman� in order to avoid the draft?) To compound the White House� problems, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a strong supporter of the war, suggested this week the Bush team has only itself to blame for setting unrealistic expectations. Americans felt frustrated by the war in Iraq �because they were led to believe this could be some kind of day at the beach."said McCain recently. "One of the biggest mistakes we made was underestimating the size of the task and the sacrifices that would be required," McCain added. With too much to handle in Iraq, can the Americans afford to wage war on Iran? We can never underestimate the stupidity of George W. Bush, so it�s anybody�s guess. My own fear is not �frying all together when we fry�. It is facing a life of hardship because of outrageous energy costs and extreme paranoia because of rampant terrorism. Very truly yours, Carl Cid S.M. Inting, [email protected], Cebu City, Aug. 24, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww THE ARCHDUKE FRANZ FERDINAND WAS NOT THE "PRETENDER", BUT THE HEIR TO THE THRONE OF THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE. A PRETENDER IS SOMEONE WHO HAS A CLAIM TO A THRONE THAT NO LONGER EXISTS, AS FOR INSTANCE, THE COMTE DE PARIS WHO WOULD BE KING OF FRANCE IF THE MONARCHY WERE RESTORED IN THAT COUNTRY. THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN MONARCHY WAS STILL VERY MUCH IN EXISTENCE WHEN THE ARCHDUKE WAS ASSASSINATED. Alex Menez, [email protected], Aug. 24, 2006 MY REPLY. You�re absolutely right. Thank you for the correction. wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Mr. Abaya, This is indeed a very frightening scenario. I hope, for the sake of the innocent children, that saner minds will prevail and pull the world from the brink of the precipice. Ethel, [email protected], Aug. 25, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww TOCAYO, WITH THE DEPTH - BREADTH OF YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF PAST HISTORY AND AND CONTEMPORARY EVENTS, IF I WERE GMA, I WOULD MAKE YOU THE SECRETARY OF THE DFA! "MABUHIGH" KA 'TOCS'! Tony Oposa, [email protected], Aug. 25, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Dear Tony, Israel will continue to be the US surrogate in any conflict, big or small, in the Middle East. The US does not trust the Muslims; Muslims feel the same way. If a war erupts in a large scale that gets other European and Asian nations that have not joined the coalition of the willing to side with the Muslims, then you could infer that WWIII has begun. The richness of the Arab land in black gold is an economic temptation for other nations to gain sole access to it. Muslims have to arm themselves if they were to survive and protect their valuable assets from the US and England. Dr. Nestor P. Baylan, [email protected], New York City, Aug. 25, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww What the hell is this left wing crap? Albert Christian Elser, [email protected], Aug. 25, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Hi Tony, Hezbollah and the Palestinians kidnapped Israeli soldiers because they wanted to obtain the release of women, children and other Palestinians that are held in Israeli prisons. Is it known how many Palestinian citizens are held in Israeli prisons? Thank you for any information you can provide. Best regards Richard Baumann, [email protected], Weiningen, Switzerland, Aug. 26, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Hi Antonio, Thanks for sending me copies of your articles. They are very well written and I enjoy reading them. I am curious as to how you got my email. Thanks. Madge Kho, [email protected], Aug. 26, 2006 MY REPLY. It is not possible to know the exact source of each email address in our files. Everyday, we receive about 100 emails, many of them with CCs. It is possible yours was one of the CCs. wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Another Tom Lehrer ditty is (sung with the music of JEALOUSY) �Leprosy, night and day you torture me� there goes your eyeball..into my highball� Good column Tocayo. Tony Joaquin, [email protected], Daly City, California, Aug. 26, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Thanks Tony, For this interesting well presented piece of information. Just the other day I mentioned the incident of the anarchist killing the archduke which led to the start of World War I and mentioned that there was no President declaring a 'War on Anarchist'. Abrazos, Jaime Calero, [email protected], Sydney, Australia, Aug. 26, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Dear Mr. Abaya, Thank you for including me in your mail group. I have made it a habit to check my mail everyday because of your articles. You have touched on the issue of Iraq in your column today (1914 or 1938), and I remembered something that I wrote when the first American bomb fell in Iraq. May I send you the article. I just wrote it. It was never published. Thank you, Danny Consumido. [email protected], Aug. 26, 2006 THE SEASON OF POMEGRANATE (Memories of Old Baghdad, before the firestorm) By Danilo de Austria Consumido IT WAS the season of pomegranate. Cartloads of the fruit, like luscious grenades dyed in blood, clogged the sidewalks of the Al-Shaallah market. �Picture! Picture!,� shouted the fruit vendors as I trained my camera on an old Arab, who stared at me stolidly. Seeing a rare tourist with a camera, the pomegranate vendors, all men, waved their hands and signaled me to take their photographs too. The winds of war were already blowing then, yet no sign of concern was evident among the people who went about their chores, rummaging through the fruit carts looking for the plump fruit, buying dried chick beans that will be ground and mashed into hummus and basmati rice from Pakistan packed in small jute bags. The Iraqis have a unique way of cooking rice, steaming it in olive oil. If they have special guests, they color the rice yellow and light green, mix tiny black and green raisins and nuts and garnish it with fried rice noodles. They serve the rice in a large dish, and on top of the heap is a stewed whole leg of lamb. And when you settle to begin to eat, they tear large chunks of flesh of the lamb with their bare hands and give it to you, and shove some of the rice, also with their hands, to your plate. In the Al-Shaallah market, one can also find Taiwan-made radios and CD players, Walkman imitations and toys peddled on the sidewalks, or along the pedestrian overpass. How these products enter Iraq is puzzling, considering the restrictions of the sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council on the country since the Gulf War in 1991. The so-called Oil for Food Program was implemented by the UN supposedly as a �humanitarian� gesture to mitigate the extreme conditions that the Iraqi people had befallen to after six straight years since 1991 of complete economic embargo and isolation. Close to a million people died during that period. Novelist Nasra Al-Saadon, editor of the Iraq Daily, the only English newspaper in the country, recalled those bitter six years. �Winter was most difficult. Electricity was down and we had no heaters and fuel. Most of us were forced to cut the trees in our yards and in the parks for fuel. The most painful moment for me was when I was forced to choose among my books to burn as fuel, page by page,� she said. Nasra, who visited Manila in 2001, was then director of the Iraq national library. But the Oil for Food Program hardly arrested the sufferings of the Iraqi people. More people died, particularly the children and the elderly, because of lack of medicines to cure diseases like diarrhea and cholera, which have been eradicated before but recurred because of dirty water caused by the destruction of the water systems. Coalition bombs in 1991 interconnected the sewage with the water systems. The Oil for Food Program allowed Iraq to sell its oil to be able to buy the basic needs of its people. But the money never goes to the hands of the Iraqis. The money is kept by the UN 661 Committee, which is based in New York . Only a third of the money is used to pay for Iraqi imports, another third is used by the UN to pay for the reparations to Kuwait and other parties affected by the Iraq attack on its former province, while the last third is used to pay for the salaries and operations of the UN officials and personnel supervising the enforcement of the embargo. The deaths multiplied and the sufferings of the Iraqi people reached catastrophic proportions, which led the conscience-stricken Dennis Halliday, head supervisor of the Program, to resign in protest of the sanctions in 1998. In an interview later by American award-winning broadcaster David Barsamian, Halliday admitted that the Oil for Food Program �was never intended to actually to resolve the humanitarian crisis� in Iraq . �It was designed to build on what the Iraqi government was already doing and still doing,� he said. In the Barsamian interview, Halliday deplored the insensitivity of the �young bureaucrats� sitting in the 661 Committee in New York , who decide on the basis of their political leanings rather than the actual needs of the Iraqis. Halliday said the committee has been holding back on many items, including ambulances, which have been endorsed by the World Health Organization. Also routinely blocked, according to Halliday, are many items in the medical drug area, medical equipment for hospitals and clinics, refrigeration � and even in education � paper, books, pencils. �This is unreal,� he said. The reason given for barring pencils from entering Iraq was that pencil leads can be used to manufacture bombs. It was said that school children had to make do with inch-long pencils in the country where writing originated. Halliday, an Irishman, was replaced by German Hans Von Sponeck as administrator of the Oil for Food Program. But he too resigned shortly, citing the same reasons given by his predecessor. A FEW minutes from the Shulla, in the heart of Old Baghdad , is the Mustanseriah District. In the district is a whole stretch of a narrow street lined with small shops selling old books, much like a Filipino tiangge. Book lovers would not want to leave that street, where original editions of the classics lie buried in unorganized book shelves and piles. For an awed poet, caressing out the dust off the hard covers of the old classics is an act of reverence and love. Books used to be a passion among Iraqis, said an unemployed Christian university professor during a barbecue dinner in his yard in the suburbs of Baghdad a block away from the main headquarters of the Baghdad police. But now Iraqis are selling away their books to raise extra cash. In between sips of arak, the Iraqi version of the lambanog, the professor, who has a masters degree in mathematics and laser technology, recalled that education used to be a pride of Iraq . The best in the Middle East , he said. Being a socialist society (Arab socialism, said Dr. Harith Al-Kashali of the Ba�ath Socialist Party), Iraqis enjoy free education from kindergarten to college. Scholarships are also offered for masters and doctorate degrees, which explains why so many officials of government have PhDs. It is not uncommon to find taxi drivers with double masters degrees. But the sanctions have resulted in the deterioration of the education system. Books and high-speed computers have not been allowed to enter the country. Paper has been declared a �double use� item, the euphemism for imports that can be used for military purposes, which are banned by the 661 Committee. �Now the quality of our students has gone down,� complained the unemployed mathematics teacher. The family was celebrating because the youngest daughter shall be working in the Baghdad embassy of Argentina . She shall henceforth be the only one in the family who shall have a regular job. To celebrate, the professor prepared chicken and beef kabab along with an assortment of salads and eggplant cooked like adobo, and brought out the wines he fermented from dates and banana for the celebrations in their yard where pink roses were in full bloom. Alcohol is sold openly in Iraq , provided it is consumed privately. FARTHER north, about 90 kilometers from the Al-Shaallah District is the governorate of Shatt Al-Hilla, where the ancient city of Babylon is located. Babylon is the most famous relic of the 8,000-year civilization of Iraq . The Iraqis have reconstructed the city that was believed to have been built 3000 B.C. Because the famous Ishtar Gate has been dismantled and brought to Germany by the Germans who invaded Iraq during World War I, the Iraqis created a replica. The old procession road of asphalt tiles, however, has been preserved, along with a few glazed tile relief of mythical animals with the head of a lion, claws of an eagle and tail of the serpent. Babylon was bombed three times during the Gulf War, said the curator of the ancient city, swearing on the Americans. �They (the Americans) have no history, only 200 years, while Iraq has 8,000 years of history,� he said. It may not be farfetched that coalition bombs will fall again on Babylon . About 500 meters from the ancient city, beyond abandoned archaeological diggings, is a new palace of Saddam Hussein perched on top of a hill overlooking Babylon . In hushed tones, the curator explained the palace is intended to be a state �guest house� of the Iraqi strongman, but cautioned me from taking photographs of the palace. But I already had a shot. FIFTY eight people died and scores of civilians wounded in the Al-Shaallah market in downtown Baghdad on March 29, the ninth day of the �shock and awe� assault of the old city by American and British soldiers, when two missiles exploded in the market. Al Jazeerah television, in a muted fashion, showed the gore of the bombing. Crumbled shops, burnt cars, dead bodies. In the heart rending footage of Al Jazeerah, I tried to locate the spot where the pomegranate carts once filled the street. I didn�t recognize it in the rubble. The video was not clear enough. But if I would have looked close enough, I would have seen flesh strewn about, in the color of pinkish unripe pomegranate. I would have seen the blood caking on the pavement, like overripe pomegranates crushed, their seeds scattered like tiny shrapnel, and their sweet-sour juice of deep crimson drying on the pockmarked street of Al-Shaallah.### (The author is president of the Philippine-Iraq Friendship Association organized in 2000 to �promote people to people relationship� between Filipinos and Iraqis. He has visited Baghdad several times, and had many interviews with Iraqi people and officials.) wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Hello, Tony, The usual ratio seems to be: number of casualties to number of troops deployed -- at least as I remember it from my history of military art classes. In Dunnigan's "How to Make War", I think, he also uses the same ratio. We were also told that 3 % casualties is acceptable in training exercises (even without using live ammo!) and up to 30 % when assaulting a fortified position, but this should be undertaken with at least three times as many men. (Probability of success with a smaller ratio is seen as low). But I am no longer sure of my figures and I can't check them right now. Also those figures were based on WW II conventional style of attack and defense, whereas current doctrines have turned the old ones upside down. Way back in the 70's, Dunnigan had already observed that hi-tech warfare encouraged optimism due to the assumption that the war can be won from a distance. When invaders deploy foot soldiers into the conflict is when the real casualty count begins. Warmest regards, Rex Robles, [email protected], Aug. 26, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Thank you, Mr. Abaya. I especially like your article on the third world war. It seems history is repeating itself and, sad to say, the world seems doomed to repeat it, especially America making psy war of what was and what is. The Lebanon war, the conflicts in the Middle East. Now the terrorists are moving the war again back to the European theather and keeping the training ground in Asia and the Middle East, including the Third wWorld nations, while the First World nations profit in the sales of arms and weapons to all nations. God bless you and your family for your vigilance. i remain, Jaime M. Claparols Jr, [email protected], Australia, Aug. 26, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww A C Abaya, Thank you for including me in your list to send your articles. They are more than welcome and greatly appreciated. The answer to you question, 1914 or 1938, in my opinion, is 1914. I believe that someone very important will be killed, either by assassination or an act of violence, in this quicksand "War on Terror", which, in itself, has no end in sight, probably for years to come. America and its allies will never be able to wipe out Islamic Terrorists. Nor will they be able to control us, the USA, in a "normal" type of war. Our troubles will start with a "normal" war over something stupid by one side or the other, more than likely coming to the defense of one of the countries we or they are trying to protect or help. That is when someone of great importance is killed. The saber rattling will begin and I fear the Nuclear Age will come into being in earnest. Our government, led by PDG (Poor Dumb George), is attuned to starting and fighting, not just wars but battles that we can't win, either politically or by violence. America has not "won" a war since World War II and that will not change anytime in the foreseeable future. All we will do is cost millions of people death and destruction.. That, however, will happen no matter who starts a nuclear war, not just us. It may be that we get blindsided by a place like North Korea just because they can and we have our attention elsewhere in the Middle East. This country is not being run by George Bush but by a far more insidious group of people that includes the Military-Industrial and Corporate complexes with Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and people in both Houses of Congress pushing the buttons and pulling the strings to make the puppet, Bush, do the dance. I agree with your article in every aspect. All I'm trying to do is send a warning, which I believe, is not too far out of line. Once again, thank you for your timely article. Ralph White, [email protected], Aug. 27, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww (Copy furnished) Jimmy, It is a case of history repeats itself for the Americans. History books tell us that the Americans came to the Philippines because of the Spanish-American War, but like in the present problem in Lebanon and in Vietnam, America was also eyeing the Philippines as early as 1895, a couple of years before the Spanish-American War erupted. This is the reason why when the war was declared, Admiral Dewey was already in Hong Kong waiting for his order to go to Manila . There is a report by the US Navy showing that the taking over of Manila was part of the global effort of America to achieve the status of a colonial seapower. This is during the American navy expansion eyeing to replace Germany , the great maritime power of the day. Renato Perdon, [email protected], Sydney , Australia , Aug. 27, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Dear Tony, Instead of building nuclear weapons themselves, non-nuclear states should come together and collectively advocate for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Just imagine a world where every state would be aspiring to acquire a nuclear weapon! Should George W. Bush decide to take out Iran's nuclear facilities, it'll be one right thing that he'll be doing, especially, in the context of Middle-East politics. I don't think even other Arab states relish the thought of Iran having a nuclear weapon. The continuing conflict in the Middle-East is due to the refusal of some Islamic states and groups to accept the existence of Israel. Israel has unilaterally withdrawn from some occupied Arab lands in the hope that the gesture be rewarded with recognition of its right to exist by belligerent Arab states and groups. But none has been forthcoming. Israel has a right to strike at Hezbollah for continuously firing deadly missiles at its population centers. But it should've done so with extreme care in avoiding Lebanese civilian casualties. Israel cannot hope to gain sympathy for its just cause unless it acts responsibly. Lebanon certainly shares in the blame for the recent carnage in its own territory. It has allowed Hezbollah to base its missiles even in populated areas. It's really difficult to have sympathy for Hezbollah for conducting its war against Israel behind innocent Lebanese civilians. This by itself is a crime against humanity and must be condemned just as Israel's wanton bombing of population centers must likewise be. Both 1914 and 1938 can be avoided in the present time if nations relate with each other responsibly, fairly, and justly. The problem with a superpower like the US is that its foreign policy is guided by capitalist greed. It employs might to undermine other states and gain unfair advantage over markets and raw materials. This causes widespread dispossession, extreme reaction from the dispossessed, and global instability. The behavior of a powerful state like the US is no different from that of the elite in our own country. They use their might to monopolize opportunities, which triggers a backlash from the deprived, and causes internal instability. It's all the same globally and nationally. It's the deadly combination of power and greed that has caused so much misery for mankind. Gico Dayanghirang, [email protected], Davao City, Aug. 28, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Dear Mr. Abaya, Regarding The Guns of August reference, you may have had in mind the article by Richard Holbrooke, former US Ambassador to the UN. See the piece, which appeared in The Washington Post, on 10 August at this web address: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/09/AR2006080901514.html. Sincerely, Bart W. Edes, [email protected], Aug.28, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Tony, This is great. Thanks for sending your website. This is the first time I looked into It.. It gives a good bird's eye of the cross-section of the reading Filipino. We have a population of thinking people. Keep this going! Jack Sherman, [email protected], Aug. 26, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Europe's Mosque Hysteria by Martin Walker Spring 2006, Wilson Quarterly For the first time since the Ottoman Turks were hurled back at the siege of Vienna in 1683, Europe has been gripped by dark, even apocalyptic visions of a Muslim invasion. The Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci has sold more than a million copies of her 2004 book The Force of Reason, in which she passionately argues that "Europe is no longer Europe, it is 'Eurabia,' a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense but also in a mental and cultural sense. Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought and for the concept itself of liberty." Renowned scholars in the United States have sounded similar notes of warning. Princeton professor emeritus Bernard Lewis, a leading authority on Islamic history, suggested in 2004 that the combination of low European birthrates and increasing Muslim immigration means that by this century's end, Europe will be "part of the Arabic west, the Maghreb ." If non-Muslims then flee Europe , as Middle East specialist Daniel Pipes predicted in The New York Sun, "grand cathedrals will appear as vestiges of a prior civilizationat least until a Saudi-style regime transforms them into mosques or a Taliban-like regime blows them up." And political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued in the inaugural issue of The American Interest that liberal democracies face their greatest challenges not from abroad but at home, as they attempt to integrate "culturally diverse populations" into one national community. "In this respect," he wrote, "I am much more optimistic about America 's long-term prospects than those of Europe ." These views flourish in the heated context of recent headlines. The crisis earlier this year over Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, with repercussions felt more in the Middle East than Europe, was preceded in October by the eruption of riots in France, in which the children of mainly North African immigrants torched some 10,000 cars and burned schools and community centers in some 300 towns and cities. A terrorist attack by four suicide bombers killed 52 in the London subway in July, and was swiftly followed by a second, abortive attack. In famously tolerant Holland , the gruesome murder by a young Islamist fanatic of the radical filmmaker Theo van Gogh in November 2004 was followed by the petrol bombings of mosques and Islamic schools. In Madrid , 191 people were killed on the city's trains on March 11, 2004 , in a coordinated bombing attack by Al Qaeda sympathizers, an event that was as traumatic for Europe as the September 11 attacks were for the United States . Less noticed in the United States was the shock that ran through Germany a year ago after the "honor killings" of eight young Turkish women by their own families in the space of four months. The women's crimes were that they refused the husbands their families had chosen for them or had sought sexual partners outside their religion and close-knit communities. This became a national scandal when a school headmaster, outraged when his Turkish pupils insisted of one of the victims that "the whore got what she deserved," wrote to press outlets and to other headmasters across Germany denouncing this "wave of hidden violence" beneath the placid surface of German life. His warning was reinforced by the German government's first detailed survey of the lives of Turkish women, in which 49 percent of them said they had experienced physical or sexual violence in their marriage. One in four of those married to Turkish husbands said they had met their grooms on their wedding day. Their curiosity at last roused, Germans were shocked to find that the homepage of Berlin 's Imam Reza Mosque (until quickly revised) praised the attacks of September 11, described women as second-class human beings who must defer to men, and denounced gays and lesbians as "animals." While these events are disturbing, it is dangerous to merge them into a single, alarmist vision of a Europe doomed to religious division, mass terrorism, white backlash, and civil war. Most immigrants continue to come to Europe to better themselves and to secure a brighter future for their children, not to promote an Osama Bin Laden fantasy of re-establishing the Caliphate and converting the Notre Dame and St. Paul cathedrals into mosques. Most Muslims in France did not riot or burn cars. Muslim clergy and civic leaders in Britain overwhelmingly denounced the London bombings. The Islamic immigration of some 15 million to 18 million people is not exactly swamping Europe 's population of more than 500 million. Nor is religious violence altogether new for a continent that spawned the Crusades, the 16th- and 17th-century wars between Catholics and Protestants, and the Holocaust. Furthermore, a Europe that within living memory produced Italy 's Red Brigades, Germany 's Red Army Faktion , France 's OAS, Spain 's ETA, and the IRA in Northern Ireland is hardly innocent of terrorism. Despite political scientist Samuel Huntington's warning of "a clash of civilizations," the Arab world is not so very alien to Europe . Judeo-Christian civilization has been shaped by the Mediterranean Sea . Its waters constituted a common communications system from which flowed a shared history. North Africa was a Roman province, and Egypt 's Queen Cleopatra was a Greek. Southern Spain was a Muslim province for seven centuries, and the Balkans were dominated by Islam until the 19th century. The Crusades were a kind of civil war between two monotheist belief systems that originated in the deserts of the Middle East . More than just a war, the Crusades were also a prolonged cultural exchange from which Europe 's Christians emerged enriched by "Arabic" numerals and medicine, the lateen sail, and the table fork. The Arabs, having already benefited from the wisdom of Greece and Rome mislaid by Europe in its Dark Ages, returned it to Europe while Venice and Genoa grew rich on the Levant trade and spurred the growth that fueled Europe 's great surge of oceanic exploration. At that point the European and Arabian�Islamic histories began to diverge, only to converge again in the 19th century in the poisoned relationship of colonial rule. The British, in India and the Persian Gulf and along the Nile, and the French and Italians, in North Africa, imposed notions of racial and cultural superiority that deeply complicate the assimilation of today's immigrants into the homelands of the old colonial masters. Those complexities have been sharpened by the urgencies of policing and domestic intelligence-gathering against the evident threat of terrorist attack. In this unhappy context, several alarmist myths are defining the debate about the impact of mass Islamic immigration into Europe . It is important to examine each one with some care. The first myth is that there is any such phenomenon as European Islam. This misapprehension may be the most pervasive, and the most easily exploded, for, once examined, the various waves and origins of the Islamic immigration reveal themselves as remarkably diverse. In Germany , although the immigrants are usually described as "Turkish," they include not only ethnic Turks, but Kurds, who speak a different language and come from a significantly different culture. Neither Kurds nor Turks can communicate with the newest wave of mainly Moroccan immigrants in any language but German. In France , the immigrants are usually described as being "of North African descent," but this is misleading. At least a quarter of the estimated six million such immigrants and their descendants in France are Berber, primarily Kabyle and Rif . They are mainly Sunni in their religion, but few of them speak the Arabic of Algeria or Morocco . Many more, from Mali and Niger , countries separated from the Maghreb by the Sahara , identified themselves to me during the French riots of last autumn as "blacks" rather than "beurs" (the French slang term for young Arabs). The rich variety of Muslim immigration is most evident in Britain, where the ethnic and linguistic divisions among British Muslims mean that they form several distinct communities whose only common language and culture (outside the mosque and the Qur'an) is English. According to the 2001 census, 69 percent of Britain 's 1.6 million Muslims come from the Indian subcontinent, and just more than half of them were born there. The rest were born in Britain . Recent research at the University of Essex by Lucinda Platt suggests that the British melting pot is working rather well, and producing considerable social mobility. She found that some 56 percent of children from Indian working-class families go on to professional or managerial jobs in adulthood, compared with just 43 percent of those from white, nonimmigrant families. The largest group of Britain's Muslims, more than half a million, are of Pakistani birth or descent, and of them almost half come from the poor district around Mirpur where the building of the Mangla dam in the late 1950s and early 1960s created a vast pool of homeless, landless, and barely literate peasants, who were then recruited to low-wage jobs in the textile industry of northern England. They clubbed together to bring over imams from home to run mosques and teach the Qur'an, imported wives from Mirpur through arranged marriages, and created urban versions of their traditional Mirpuri villages under the gray English skies. When the British textile industry declined, this community of poor and ill-educated people was locked into a grim cycle of unemployment, welfare, female illiteracy, and low expectations. The rust belt that stretches across Lancashire and Yorkshire is the region where the anti-immigration British National Party, a thuggish group with neo-Nazi links, gets up to 20 percent of the vote from an almost equally ill-educated and hopeless white working class. This is also the area that produces most of the dozen or so honor killings carried out each year by angry fathers or brothers, when a Pakistani girl falls in love with a British boy. The next largest cohort, nearly 400,000, comes from Bangladesh , mostly from the Sylhet region. These people are very different: They speak Bengali rather than Urdu, eat rice rather than roti, apply less rigid dress codes to women, follow a notably more relaxed form of Islam, and are concentrated in East London rather than northern England . They tend also to be more entrepreneurial and open to educational opportunities for their children, who have a far better record of university attendance than the Pakistanis. The third major group is the Muslims of Indian origin, many of whom came to Britain in the early 1970s as refugees from East Africa after being expelled by Uganda 's dictator, Idi Amin. Along with the 16th-century Huguenots from France and the 19th-century Jews from Russia , they have become one of the most desirable and successful immigrant groups that Britain ever welcomed. They have produced more millionaires and college graduates than any other ethnic groupthe British included. One in 20 is a doctor. The 31 percent of British Muslims from outside South Asia are mainly from Somalia and Turkey , each cohort totaling about 60,000. Another 100,000 come from Nigeria , Malaysia , and Iran . The students, refugees, political exiles, and Arab intellectuals who have come from all over the Islamic world and given the city the nickname "Londonistan" make up most of the rest. So the reality behind the monolithic term "British Muslim" is a potpourri: the wealthy London surgeon, the unemployed and barely literate textile worker in Oldham, the Malaysian accounting student intent on attending business school, the fiery newspaper columnist who dares not return to Saudi Arabia, the government clerk living with her English boyfriend and estranged from her outraged Iraqi family, the prosperous Bengali restaurant owner in East London. These are the individuals that Prime Minister Tony Blair hopes to rallyafter the cultural and political shock of the London bombingsto the common identity of Britishness, by which he means a full-hearted commitment to democracy, and the freedom of speech and religion and lifestyles that it involves. And in these days of Al Qaeda, Blair has sought to convince such individuals that being British may include detention of terrorist suspects without trial for up to 90 days, closed-circuit television cameras in their mosques, and government licenses for their imams. An estimated 1,800 of Britain's 3,000 full-time imams come from overseas, mainly from Pakistan, and many arrive with Saudi funds and sponsorship and after some study in Saudi Arabia, which usually means a commitment to that country's puritanical and dominant Wahhabi creed. Many of the moderate elders of Britain 's Muslim community go along with Blair's plans, which also have the backing of the Muslim members of Parliament. The mainstream of Muslim opinion is now prepared to admit that the four British-born bombers of the London transport system were influenced by extremists at their mosques in Britain and during visits to Afghanistan and Pakistan , and that this radicalization of some young Muslims is a community problem. "The Muslim communities are not reaching those people who they need to engage with and win their hearts and minds," says Sadiq Khan, the Muslim Labor MP for the London suburb of Tooting. "What leads someone to do this? The rewards they are told they will get in the hereafterit is incumbent on Muslims to tell them that nowhere in Islam does it say this, and in fact what you will get is hellfire." It is ironic that in the wake of the London bombings, the British political establishment and media, and even many Muslim groups in Britain , are now speaking of the Muslim community as a single entity. This may yet emerge, especially if others persist in viewing all Muslims as one mass, although so far various Muslim groupings seem to compete for the title of spokesman, and to criticize one another for being more or less radical or devout or co-opted by the British government (a phenomenon that is also evident in France, as it was in the 1960s civil rights movement in the United States). The fact is that the various Muslim associations in Britain , speaking Urdu or Pashtun or Bengali at home, have little in common except the sense of alarm that somehow they will share in the blame, or suffer the backlash, for the bombings. But some of the things they do have in common are striking. Around 15 percent of Muslims, both male and female, are registered as unemployed, compared with four percent of the rest of the population. The British government's Labor Force Survey found that Muslims are more likely than any other group to be in long-term unemployment or not even seeking workin either case, not reflected in unemployment data. In the same survey, 31 percent of employed Muslims had no qualifications and, therefore, little prospect of advancement from menial work. Muslims are five times more likely to marry by age 24 than other Britons. Muslims have the youngest age profile of all religious groups: 34 percent are under the age of 16, compared with 18 percent of Christians. Muslims tend to live together; nearly two-thirds of the 600,000 Muslims who live in London reside in the two East End boroughs of Newham and Tower Hamlets. And Muslims are more likely to reside in rented public housing than any other ethnic or religious group. Figures such as these have seeded a number of misleading submyths, of which the most common is that the "Pakis" live in ghettos and are beginning to dominate in a significant number of parliamentary constituencies. A by-election in the northwest London suburb of Brent East shortly after Blair's government invaded Iraq alongside U.S. forces became the prime exhibit of this argument. Traditionally a safe Labor constituency, Brent East fell to the Liberal Democrats when many Muslims voted against Labor in protest of the war. In the general election of last year, a former Labor MP, George Galloway, who had been expelled from the party after his outspoken attacks on the war and on "Tony Blair's lie machine," narrowly won reelection in East London as an independent MP, unseating the only MP who was both black and Jewish, the Labor Party's pro-war Oona King. In his first two election victories, Blair carried more than 70 percent of the Muslim vote, but in the 2005 election, exit polls suggest that he got just 32 percent. This seems to have been a direct result of the Iraq war and draws a sharp limit on previous assumptions of common ground between Islam and Blair's Labor Party. But the fact is that there are only 17 electoral constituencies in Britain , out of 646, where a complete shift of the immigrant vote would be sufficient to unseat the incumbent MP. Although television images depict whole districts where most shop signs are printed in Urdu or where Sikhs and other immigrants predominate, there are few places that fit the classic definition of a ghetto. In some detailed research at the University of Manchester , Ludi Simpson analyzed the 1991 and 2001 census data for 8,850 electoral wards in England and Wales . A ward is a subdistrict of a constituency, containing roughly 10,000 voters. Simpson found that the number of "mixed" wards (defined as wards where at least 10 percent of residents are from an ethnic minority) increased from 964 to 1,070 over the decade. In only 14 wards did one minority account for more than half the population, and there was not one ward where white people made up less than 10 percent of the inhabitants. The reality is that as immigrant families become established and their children get education and jobs, they tend to move out to more prosperous districts with better schools and housing. In short, just as Britain learned with its West Indian immigrants in the 1960s and 1970s that what was defined as a problem of race was just as much one of social and economic class, so it is finding with its Muslims that race and class and religion all play into a context of social and economic mobility. Britain has been fortunatethis mobility has been possible because the country has enjoyed a booming economy over the past decade, with much lower levels of unemployment than France or Germany . Despite all this, a small number of educated and apparently well-assimilated young Muslims, mainly but not exclusively of Pakistani origin, have been drawn to the extreme militancy of Al Qaeda. Sources in MI5, Britain 's security service, cite a formula devised by their French equivalent, the Renseignements G�n�raux, to calculate the number of fundamentalists in a given population. Based on an extensive analysis of the French scene, the formula says that in a given Muslim population in Europe , an average of five percent are fundamentalists, and up to three percent of those fundamentalists should be considered dangerous. By that calculation, in France 's Muslim population of six million, there are 300,000 fundamentalists, of whom 9,000 are potentially dangerous. Applying the formula to Britain 's 1.6 million Muslims produces 80,000 fundamentalists, of whom some 2,400 may be dangerousa figure very close to the number of MI5 agents. Assessing the scale of the problem brings into focus the second great myth that confuses the issue of Islam in Europe , which is that native Europeans have been so sapped of their reproductive vigor that Muslim immigrants' higher birthrates threaten to replace traditionally Christian Europe with an Islamic majority within this century. The birthrate of native Europeans has fallen sharply since the baby boom of the 1960s. The usual measure is total fertility rate (TFR), the number of children an average woman will bear in her lifetime. A TFR of 2.1 is required to maintain population stability; the current average level in the 25-nation European Union is just under 1.5, and as low as 1.2 in Italy and Latvia . A study for the European Parliament suggests that the EU will need an average of 1.6 million immigrants every year until 2050 to keep its population at the current level. To maintain the current ratio of working-age population to pensioners, more than 10 million immigrants a year would be required. Omer Taspinar, director of the Brookings Institution's program on Turkey, suggests that the Muslim birthrate in Europe is three times higher than that of non-Muslim Europeans, and that since about one million new Islamic immigrants arrive in Western Europe each year, by 2050 one in five Europeans likely will be Muslim. But this is to ignore the clear evidence that immigrant birthrates fall relatively quickly toward the local norm. A recent survey by Justin Vaisse of the French Foreign Ministry, who is also an adjunct professor at the Institut d'�tudes Politiques in Paris , suggests that, on the basis of French statistics, this change can occur within a single generation. In Britain, Muslims of Indian origin now have a TFR of less than 2.0, and while there are striking regional differences in the birthrates of young women of Pakistani origin who have been born in Britain and educated in British schools, the overall trend is toward fewer children. Moreover, in Sweden , France , and Britain , the native birthrate has started to rise again, with a marked surge among women who start having children in their early thirties. In Britain , the TFR climbed from a record low of 1.63 in 2001 to 1.77 in 2004, when the number of babies born rose by almost three percent from the previous year. There is no doubt that immigrants tend to have higher birthrates; one in five of those new babies was born to a mother from outside Britain , a significant rise from the one in eight of a decade earlier. But the disparity of birthrates across Europe is so widefrom TFRs of 1.98 in Ireland and 1.89 in France to 1.18 in the Czech Republicthat it is not meaningful to speak of a single European phenomenon. Furthermore, public policy is not helpless in the face of demographic challenges. Scandinavia has higher birthrates than the rest of Europe , despite relatively low immigration rates, thanks in part to government policies that provide generous maternity leave, family allowances, and good child care for working mothers. Parenting in these days of easy contraception is an essentially voluntary matter. And if a society chooses to have fewer children, it does not have to resort to mass immigration to maintain a high proportion of workers to consumers. Other accommodations can be made, from delaying the age of retirement to accepting lower growth rates and less intensive patterns of consumption. And thus we arrive at the final myth about Islam in Europe : that a shrinking and aging population of native-born Europeans and a large and growing Islamic population can only be alarming. It certainly looked that way last fall in France during the riots, which seemed to demonstrate, in the ugliest possible way, that something fundamental in the French social system, and thus in its broader European counterpart, is in deep trouble. There are, in fact, two different crises of the European social model, and they collided in the riots. The first is the familiar problem of economic sluggishness that has stuck France , Germany , and Italy with double-digit unemployment for a decade. One cause is the power of the labor unions and the longtime understanding that workers and management are "social partners" in an agreement under which those with jobs are protected, paid well, and given generous pensions and social security. In return, managers get high productivity rates and very few strikes in the private sector. But as a consequence, it is extremely hard to get a secure job, since managers find it almost impossible to lay off surplus employees. The low-wage entry-level jobs that have brought so many of the unskilled British and American dropouts into the workforce barely exist in France , where the minimum wage and employer-paid social insurance costs are very high. This first crisis has now intersected with the second: that of the largely immigrant underclass, whose young dropouts find it difficult to get any work at all. The problem is most acute in France , where immigrants constitute more than 10 percent of the population, compared with five percent in Britain . They live in what the French now admit are so many ghettos of high-rise public housing blocks with few whites, poor schools, sparse social amenities, harsh policing, and little evidence that they can ever partake of the broad prosperity of mainstream Europe. "They are the lost lands of France ," says Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux, a professor at the prestigious school of public administration at the Institut d'�tudes Politiques. And yet these grim urban nightmares contain, in demographic terms, much of the country's future, even though their precise numbers are not counted under that other French mythdating back to the revolution of 1789 with its Rights of Manthat there are no ethnic subgroups, only citizens. No affirmative action is necessary, the line goes, because La R�publique has abolished racism. " France is not a country like others," intoned the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, in November. "It will never accept that citizens live separately, with different opportunities and with unequal futures. For more than two centuries, the Republic has found a place for everyone by elevating the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. We must remain faithful to this promise and to Republican demands." The best estimates suggest there are now more than five million Muslims and two million blacks in France , and their birthrates are more than twice as high as that of French whites. So while the brown and black inhabitants of France account for one-eighth of the total population, they account for almost a quarter of those under the age of 25. They also account for more than half of the prison population, and close to half of the unemployed. France 's future therefore depends on a sullen and ill-educated underclass of future workers and consumers whose taxes are supposed to finance the welfare state and the pensions of French whites, who at age 60 retire after a lifetime of leisurely 35-hour workweeks. After the scenes that disfigured France last fall, this does not seem to be a promising proposition. And this problem of France is the problem of Europe on a slightly less urgent scale. Alarmists say that without mass immigration, the European social system cannot be funded; but with mass immigration, the European social fabric is visibly and violently tearing apart. And with Jean-Marie Le Pen, the right-wing extremist who leads the Front National, winning almost five million votes in the last presidential election, France has less room for political maneuvering than most countries. If the myth of de Villepin's Republic is gently retired, and France tries some of the detested Anglo-Saxon remedies of affirmative action to produce a black and Muslim middle class, and puts black and brown faces onto its television screens as announcers, into the higher ranks of the police and civil service and armed forces, and into the National Assembly and the Senate and the prefectures and the corporate boardrooms, then it risks strengthening the white backlash that has already given the demagogue Le Pen some 18 percent of the presidential vote. It is, nonetheless, a risk that will have to be taken because no other course is practicable. Modern democracies cannot realistically, or legally, impose ethnic cleansing by mass deportations of Muslim minorities or their permanent subjugation by some odious incarnation of a discriminatory police state. The policy alternatives therefore are assimilation or apartheid. The former will be difficult, since it will require fundamental economic reform to tackle the problems of unemployment, education (of both Muslims and those poor whites most likely to resort to backlash), reform of immigration rules and border policing to control illegal immigration, and profound religious reform by the Muslims themselves. European societies should not be expected to tolerate subgroups that seek to impose sharia within their communities, nor imams who preach anti-Semitism or demand the death penalty for Muslims who convert to Christianity or for writers such as Salman Rushdie. But equally, European societies will have to accept the political implications of a significant and growing electoral vote that will agitate strongly for respect of Islam as well as jobs, opportunities, and affirmative action, and that will demand influence over foreign policy. The challenge is serious but not hopeless. To suggest that European civilization is too feeble and insecure to survive an Islamic population that is currently less than five percent of the total is a counsel of cultural despair. It ignores the example of the United States , which seems to be successfully assimilating its own Muslim minority, just as the vibrant and open American economy assimilated so many previous waves of immigrants. It also ignores the degree to which European Muslims increasingly think and live like the populations they have joined. An opinion poll conducted in Britain for the BBC after the London bombings found that almost nine in 10 of the more than 1,000 Muslims surveyed said they would and should help the police tackle extremists in Britain 's Muslim communities. More than half wanted foreign Muslim clerics barred or expelled from Britain . Fifty-six percent said they were optimistic about their children's future in Britain . And only one in five said that Muslim communities had already integrated too much with British society, while 40 percent wanted more integration. Muslims are being changed by Europe just as much as they are changing their adopted countries. The honor killings of young Turkish women in Germany are appalling, but the actions of the women also demonstrate that many Muslim women are no longer content to abide by their parents' wishes. They want the same freedoms and opportunities enjoyed by the German girls with whom they went to school. The French-born children of immigrants who rioted in the Paris suburbs were demanding to be treated as French by the police, potential employers, and society in general. The riots, as French scholar Olivier Roy has noted, were "more about Marx than Muhammad." Across Europe , there are significant numbers of potential terrorist cells, radical Islamist activists and organizations, and mosques and imams that cleave to an extreme and puritanical form of Islam. Many of these reject the idea that Muslim immigrants can or should assimilate into their host societies, and also reject Western democracy or any separation of church and state. One such group is the well-organized Hizb-ut-Tahir, which seeks to reestablish the Caliphate as a pan-Islamic system of government based on the Qur'an. Hizb-ut-Tahir is outlawed in Germany , where it has been described as "a conveyor belt for terrorism," and Blair threatened to ban it in Britain after the London bombings. But there are other, more promising currents of modern and reformist Islamic thought in Europe that seek assimilation not only with European societies but also with Western values of individual human and political rights. The best known of these currents is associated with Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and author of To Be a European Muslim (1999). Ramadan believes that an independent and liberal Islam is emerging in Europe among young, educated Muslims who have been profoundly and positively influenced by modern liberal democracy with its free press and separation of church and state. He moved from Geneva to Oxford , where he currently teaches, after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security barred him in 2004 from taking a teaching post at Notre Dame University . (He was also banned in Saudi Arabia , Tunisia , and Egypt after calling for a moratorium on sharia's corporal punishment, stoning, and beheading.) Ramadan identifies himself as a European born and bred, with Muslim roots, whose modernized Islamic faith needs to uproot Islamic principles from their cultures of origin and plant them in the cultural soil of Western Europe . "We've got to get away from the idea that scholars in the Islamic world can do our thinking for us. We need to start thinking for ourselves," Ramadan insists. Some Muslims see Ramadan as an apostate, while many Christian and Jewish activists regard him as an Islamic Trojan horse. But he seems to represent a significant current in Islam that seeks reform in the Arab world and accommodation with the West. There are traces of this same current in the speeches of Dyab Abou Jahjah, the Belgium-based trade unionist who founded the Arab European League (though he is denounced by the Belgian government). It is also evident in the extraordinary appeal of the Arab world's first Muslim televangelist, Amr Khaled, who was in Britain during the London bombings and repudiated them as un-Islamic. There is nothing ineluctable about any clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. Current demographic trends are not immutable, and it would be foolish to extrapolate from them a spurious forecast about Muslim majorities in Europe . That the renewed encounter between Europe and its Islamic minorities will result in terrorism or sectarian and ethnic tensions is not foreordained, and a white backlash is by no means inevitable. But the clear prospect that these poisonous predictions could be realized may itself become the antidote. The countries of Europe and their Islamic minorities have had a series of awful warnings, similar to those in the United States in the 1960s. The American response to the civil rights movement is an example to Europe of how open, liberal democracies may address the problems of Islamic immigration and mobilize public opinion and public policy to resolve them. It will not be easy, and the task will endure for generations, at constant risk of being derailed by spasmodic riots and terrorist outrages. But the alternatives are worse. Martin Walker, the editor of United Press International, covered the London bombings and the French riots last year. He is a senior scholar at the Wilson Center and the author of many books, most recently the novel The Caves of P�rigord (2002). Reprinted from Spring 2006 Wilson Quarterly OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO |